Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;

First, a word about nomenclature. In my reading of the references for this article, I found that people use alternative spellings for "Portobello mushroom." As shown in the figure, a Google Search finds 927,000 websites in which the mushroom is spelled as "Portobello," about half as many using "Portabella," and a considerable number using two other spellings. This must be how written languages without vowels developed. The preferred spelling is "Portobello."

Treatment with a strong base like KOH is not environmentally friendly, and that has encouraged scientists to look for a biomass replacement.[3] Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, decided to look at mushroom biomass, since mushrooms have naturally high porosity. For mushrooms, this porosity is important to allow the absorption of water and air. Furthermore, mushrooms have a high concentration of potassiumsalts, which would allow pore growth during use.[3]

The process for creation of carbon anode material from Portobello mushrooms, a two-stage pyrolysis, is shown in the above figure. Oxygen-rich organic compounds and potassiumcompounds in the mushroom skins create inner void spaces in carbon nanoribbons, and the resulting material is analogous to activated carbon.[2] The pyrolysis at 900°C produces a hierarchicallyporous material with pore size ranging from sub-nanometer to tens of nanometers.[3]

"With battery materials like this, future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease, due to apparent activation of blind pores within the carbon architectures as the cell charges and discharges over time."[3]

The Portobello mushroom anode material was shown to have a significant capacity increase for charge/discharge cycles beyond the number for conventional anodes. The anodes had a capacity of more than 260 mAh/g after 700 cycles.[2]

The six million electric vehiclesforecast to be built by 2020 would require nearly 900,000 tons of graphite for battery anodes.Clearly, a "green" manufacturing process is required.[3] The UC Riverside research team is developing prototype pouch batteries based on this novel type of anode. Patents have been filed.[3]